2024 SL SUG meetings week #24 summary

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday,  June 11th, 2024 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript, and were taken from my chat log and the video by Pantera – my thanks to her as always for providing it.

Meeting Overview

• The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
• These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Every Tuesday at 12:00 noon SLT.
  • In text (no Voice)
  • At this location.
• Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
• Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Simulator Deployments

• On Tuesday, June 11th, the Main SLS channel was restarted without any deployment due to a bug in the Spring Break release.
• On Wednesday, June 12th, all RC channels should be updated with the bug fixed version of Spring Break, if it clears QA.

SL Viewer Updates

• On Monday, June 10th:
  • The Materials Featurettes RC viewer, version 7.1.8.9375512768 and dated June 5th, 2024, was updated to de facto release status, bringing with if 2K texture upload support, PBR terrain and PBR mirrors (see: Launching Mirrors, PBR Terrain and 2k Textures in Second Life!).
    • I currently have two blog posts related to this in preparation, which will be published in due course.
  • The Maintenance B RC was updated to version 7.1.8.9130881608.

The rest of the current official viewers in the pipeline remain as:

• Release viewer: Maintenance X RC (usability improvements), version 7.1.7.8974243247, dated May 8 and  promoted May 13 – no change.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Maintenance C RC (reset skeleton in all viewers), version 7.1.7.8820704257, May 6.
• Project viewers:
  • WebRTC Voice project viewer, version 7.1.4.8947030231, May 8.

In Brief

Please refer to the video for the following:

• The server team has recently switched over to Gitflow as their workflow. This may enable the team to provide very bleeding-edge simulator channels on Aditi (the Beta grid), where the curious can poke at code that is mostly untried and certainly untested.
• For the current week, the server team is engaged on a bugsmash run: suspending work on their core projects and spending a week(ish) focusing on resolving bugs and smaller features for inclusion in a future simulator release. Further requests for simulator-side fixes were taken at the meeting.
• Monty’s work on smoothly the impact of teleports into regions is starting on its way to being included in a simulator update – no time frame on when it will surface, however.
• Leviathan Linden pointed out that there is a public github repository for the official “master message template”. This is the file which describes all of the “message” blocks that can be packed in the UDP SL protocol, both between the viewer and the server and also between the backend servers, and which can be used during local builds of the viewer. However, the  repository has been stale for 7 years, and he is now updating it with up-to-date information.
• A discussion on avatar physics shapes, physics on avatar attachment (none), avatar physics shapes and hit boxes (the latter related to future Combat 2.0 work).
• General discussions on features and options (not all of them simulator-related).

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.